Your Right to Know

NEW YORK — The U.S. government paid almost $80 million in unemployment benefits during the worst
of the economic downturn to households that made more than $1 million, including a record $29.9
million in 2010, tax records show.

Almost 3,200 households — about 20 percent of them from New York — that reported adjusted gross
income of more than $1 million received jobless-insurance payments averaging $12,600 in 2010, the
latest year for which figures are available, according to IRS data compiled by Bloomberg. Those
payments outpaced the total incomes for about 25 million households.

The $80 million represents less than 0.01 percent of this year’s $845 billion projected deficit.
Yet the unemployment aid to millionaire households underscores the lack of means-testing in some
federal-aid programs.

“So many people are taking advantage of government support that they probably feel like, why
shouldn’t they take advantage of it, too?” said George Walper Jr., president of the Spectrem Group,
a Chicago market-research firm that tracks the number of households worth more than $1 million.

Lawmakers repeatedly have tried to end or limit benefits to high-income households. A January
report by the Congressional Research Service found at least five such efforts.

The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t release information about individual income-tax filers, so
it’s impossible to identify specific millionaires who received unemployment benefits. It’s also
unknown whether the benefits were paid to a person who earned $1 million during a year in which
they were unemployed for part of the time, or to a spouse.

The benefits are unlikely to have gone to a dependent, such as a college-aged child living in a
millionaire household, because they would file a separate tax return to account for their own
income.

The federal data shows 610 millionaire households receiving jobless benefits in 2010 filed their
returns from New York, second to more-populous California, which had 810.